Posts tagged DisneyResearch

Many RPGs have more than one ending, but even then you still have limited ways to control the story or to interact with the characters. Disney Research, however, wants to make real interactive games -- ones where your actions can affect how it progresses and ends -- so it has created a platform th...

The robotic turtle above can't wield katanas, eat pizza or shout cowabunga, but it can still do something awesome: draw big sand sketches on the beach. It's named "Beachbot" and was developed by a team from ETH Zurich and the Zurich division of Disney Research, a network of labs responsible for so...

We didn't expect Disney Research to have one of the more inventive uses of YouTube's crazy frame-rate capabilities, but here we are. The outfit's released its trippy Lucid Dreams of Gabriel short via Google's video wing and, despite it being around four months late, the filmmaking techniques are i...

We're keen on checking in with the folks at Disney Research from time to time to see what crazy projects its been working on. At SIGGRAPH Asia this week, the outfit is presenting recent work in crafting more detailed 3D-rendered eyes. In order to properly capture all the details needed to make thi...

Disney Research has found a way to preserve the awesome quality of high-dynamic range or HDR videos when they're shown on consumer-level TVs and displays. See, HDR videos can show shadows and light better than footage taken by conventional equipment can -- in fact, the setting's purpose is to reco...

More and more people are starting to record their daily lives, whether by traditional video cams or first-person live-loggers attached to glasses, headsets, necklaces or even handbags. Since a group of people (say, at a party) are bound to capture videos of the same event from multiple points of v...

Printing in three dimensions allows for a ton of really cool (and life-saving) stuff, but one area it apparently hasn't conquered just yet is realistically reproducing human hair. The masterminds at Disney Research think they have a solution for that conundrum. Instead of trying to capture individ...

The spinning top is one of the oldest and seemingly simplest toys devised in human history, but that doesn't mean we can't improve it. Disney Research has come up with a new algorithm that allows it to design a stable spinning toy out of almost any shape. Researchers found that shapes that fail to...

Disney Research has done an awful lot of neat stuff in the past, but it hasn't really approached Walt's bread and butter before: video. Instead of going with animation, though, the team is using some pretty slick camera tricks to tell a live-action story about unconditional love and a mother attai...

Disney Research has had some neat ideas in the past (capacitive touch feedback for plants, as an example), but the lab's amped up the cute factor lately. Its newest project? Getting tiny, LED-adorned robots to illustrate things such as The Big Bang. Like a good deal of Mickey's science projects, t...

Disney has a knack for making the mundane magical, whether it's transforming a pumpkin into a carriage or a few sheets of paper into a generator. The team from Disney Research accomplished the latter by constructing a simple mechanism with a few low-cost items, like Teflon, conductive adhesives, w...

If the future of haptic technology is your jam, then the symposium on User Interface Systems and Technology at the University of St. Andrews is the place to be this week. Teams from Disney Research and the University of Bristol will present two different approaches to adding 3D tactility to touch ...

Google Glass owners have long had walking directions; as of an update rolling out today, they're getting mass transit directions as well. Commuters who've paired Glass with an Android phone can now see both the stops they'll need and the time it will take to reach their destination. While mass tra...

There are already devices that transmit sound to your body without speakers. But what if your body was the speaker? Disney Research has just explored that possibility through its Ishin-Den-Shin project. The experiment amplifies mic input and sends it back as a high voltage, low current signal that...

If you're hoping to get some more tactile feedback out of augmented reality environments, the folks at Disney Research have devised the AIREAL system that could end up doing just that. The team is showing off the project at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies space, so we made sure to stop by for a l...

Disney Research is at it again. The arm of Walt's empire responsible for interactive house plants wants to add haptic feedback not to a seat cushion, but to thin air. Using a combination of 3D-printed components -- thank the MakerBots for those -- with five actuators and a gaggle of sensors, AIREA...

We thought it'd take years to see Surround Haptics make its way affordably into future living rooms. After all, it was only at last year's SIGGRAPH that Disney Research demoed the tech in a $5,000 prototype chair. But with the impending release of The Avengers-branded Vybe gaming pad, it's clear t...

It's entirely possible for robots to juggle or play catch. They've usually been relegated to playing with their own kind, however, which is as good an excuse as any for Disney Research to experiment with a ball-tossing robot tailored to games with humans. The animatronic creation uses a depth-awar...

Creating a truly multi-user, multi-touch display is a tricky prospect. How do you know who's who short of turning the screen into one giant fingerprint reader? Chris Harrison, Ivan Poupyrev and Munehiko Sato at Disney Research have suggested in a paper that fingerprinting on a capacitive touchscre...

A group of engineers from Disney Research have crafted a new method to create interactive objects using 3D printers. Referred to as "printed optics," the lure of this technology is the ability to transform inert 3D models into interactive subjects by embedding 3D printed light piping into an objec...